Agnes Arnold-Forster > Quotes

“Immigrants, refugees and the displaced might have yearned for the homes they had left behind – but those homes had gone. They longed for somewhere, but that somewhere was a place preserved in a particular moment in history.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Davis was one of the first social scientists to theorize nostalgia. He argued that nostalgia made false use of the past. It is a reconstruction of events that can never offer a perfect facsimile. As a result, nostalgia tells us more about the present, its moods and anxieties, than about past realities.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Like many of those who lived through the Second World War, he had witnessed the horrifying consequences of overly myopic nationalism – a sentiment he partially blamed on nostalgic tendencies among people who had never quite managed to wrest themselves from the fantasies of youth and the family. Fascism, for him, was an unintended consequence of societies that were resistant to change.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Some left-wing commentators have criticized recent populist movements for their nostalgic appeals to a mythic bygone age. From Brexit to Donald Trump’s attempts to ‘Make America Great Again’, nostalgia persuades, deludes and charms people into making electoral decisions. Even the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, blamed Brexit on Britain’s ‘nostalgia for the past’.31 For many, it is a fundamentally (small-c) conservative emotion, one held by people unwilling to engage with modern life – the proverbial ostriches with their heads in the sand.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion